(Amtrak) Train forced to stop, engineer beaten

Source: SF Chronicle

The engineer of an Amtrak Capitol Corridor train was seriously
injured Monday night in West Sacramento after a group of people
forced the train to stop, dragged the engineer from the train
and assaulted him with rocks and bottles, according to Capitol
Corridor officials.

The attack occurred as the train from the Bay Area neared the
I Street Bridge to Sacramento's rail station and slowed for a
signal, said Eugene Skoropowski, managing director of the
Capitol Corridor. A group of people stood on the tracks to
block the train, which stopped. When the engineer went
downstairs and opened the door, he was dragged off the
train and assaulted, Skoropowski said.

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Read more: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/18/BAGO2PAMV31.DTL

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Is it Blade Runner yet? Or The Running Man?
Or any of dozens of other post-apocalyptic futures
that seemed unreal when they were created but now
seem altogether too real? It's starting to feel like
On the Beach would be a best-case scenario.

Tesha

How did they force a train to stop?

he had a choice, either stop or kill them. :shrug:

Absolutely goddam right

the signal turned red. The train had to stop because of the red light.

told us about it last night. I take the earlier train and wasn't on the one it happened, but heard stories about how horrified the commuters were. Some made phone calls home to say their "last good-bye" ... many thought that those thugs stopped the train to rob/kill passengers.

I think Amtrak trains should have armed train marshals, as they have in airplanes.

As I understand it, air marshals are put on planes to prevent hijackings. You can't really hijack an Amtrak, I mean, you could, but you would sort of be confined to the rails, it's not like you could drive it off the rails and ram it into a building. It's awful that this happened, but I don't see how Amtrak is any different of a location for this type of thing than any Greyhound or even regular city bus...

You never saw The Taking of Pelham One Two Three?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taking_of_Pelham_One_Two_Three_%28film%29

Even trains are suitable targets in our insane world.
Cast your memory back to the shooting in the LIRR train
that led to Carolyn McCarthy from Long Island running
for and winning a seat in Congress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_McCarthy

Tesha

Maybe their plan was to rob the passengers but they got cold feet.

IMDB

Runaway Train (1985)

Manny is the "boss" of the convicts in an Alaskan high security prison. Renken, the heartless prison's administrator wants to kill him, so Manny escapes with the help of another young prisoner, Buck, who follows him. The two fugitives manage to get to a rail depot and get onboard a train. The problem is, the engineer has died and the the train is totally out of control, and nothing can stop it. So, leaving the prison, Manny and Buck find themselves aboard something that is both their freedom and their death...

Stars Jon Voight

Train passengers are not checked for weapons and there are usually just two conductors on our train. They might not be able to hijack the train, but what about all the passengers on the train? What happens if they shoot the engineer?

Hell, yes, they should have armed marshals on the train.

> Hell, yes, they should have armed marshals on the train.

Maybe we should just have armed marshals everywhere, ehh?
Every metro station, every school, every street corner?
Give them all automatic weapons, tear gas canisters,
and the like; keep us all in line.

That sounds like a society I want to live in (NOT!).

Tesha

and they were absolutely horrified. They made "last calls" to their loved ones to say good-bye. Grown, big men calling their wives crying or running to the restroom and locking themselves in.

These trains have four cars, only two conductors, and many passengers. No security and no checking for any weapons.

"Give them all automatic weapons, tear gas canisters, and the like; keep us all in line" ... sorry, I already had too much red herring for lunch.

...except guns.

Tesha

> I've talked to the passengers who were on the train that night
> and they were absolutely horrified. They made "last calls" to their
> loved ones to say good-bye. Grown, big men calling their wives crying
> or running to the restroom and locking themselves in.

Sound like either drunk or otherwise temporarily incapable individuals.

If they were not under the influence of any drugs then they strike me
as particularly weak and prone to hysteria (or maybe too hooked on the
diet of crap from their TV?).

> These trains have four cars, only two conductors, and many passengers.
> No security and no checking for any weapons.

Have you *any* idea what effect it would have to "check for weapons" at
all of the places where passengers can get on & off?

Get a grip people! :eyes:

stopped at night by a gang of thugs and the engineer dragged out and beat to a bloody pulp...

People who say "get a grip people" are usually the first ones to piss their pants

and, where did I suggest that they should start "checking for any weapons"??? I pointed out that it is not done.

Thanks for your empathy for your fellow human beings. :eyes:

It was respect that was lacking in my post (not accidentally either).

> The day a grazed (sic) gunman killed 32 students at VT their train was
> stopped at night by a gang of thugs ...

And? Had they just come from there? If so, my apologies as I can now
understand their mindless fear. (See, I do empathise ...) If not, my
original comments apply.

> They made "last calls" to their
> loved ones to say good-bye. Grown, big men calling their wives crying
> or running to the restroom and locking themselves in.

As I said, hysteria & blind panic (assuming they were sober and not
under the influence of any drug beyond media hype and Bush-induced
Terra-itis).

> People who say "get a grip people" are usually the first ones to
> piss their pants

Only if there's a big grown man crying to his wife from the restroom! :P

should we have armed marshalls there too? you didn't answer my question.

in fact, they SHOULD be, in many countries they are.

Welcome to 1984...

Plan to bring about Facism.

1. Create Crisis
2. Propose solution
3. Remove Freedoms.

Doomed before we knew what hit us...

Prediction. Marhall law will be declared before shrub leaves office.

DICK-Tator for life...I can hear him now...

"hehe...suckers..."

If it was one weird person doing this it would make some sort of twisted sense, I guess, but a GROUP of people? Why would a group of people collude to stop a train?

it's a popular hangout for "street people", around the river/train tracks. who knows what their motives were tho....:shrug:

It seems like the reporter who wrote the story would have given more information about what motivated a group of people to stand on the tracks, stop a train, and beat the conductor.

Were the reporter, the press, the police and everyone else just too busy listening to news about the Virginia Tech shooting?

unlawflcombatnt

Economic Populist Forum

really people like this out there.

Those thugs who beat the engineer to pulp certainly had some of his traits.

No age, no race? Nothing?

on edit: All I can think of is gang initiation.

WTF is what I said. Why???

this is very weird.

He had protection there, plus a radio to call for assistance in necessary.

may soon find that it's not a viable activity. Splat, splat!

their way. This sounded like the Jesse James Gang. When all of us are gun-toten all kinds of chaos will break out. I guess the gun lobbyists would say - if the engineer had a gun - this wouldn't have happened.

In the words of Lee Greenwood - I'm proud to be an American.

Especially when a gun wasn't involved. Now had the conductor had a gun, this would have had a different ending.

Now drink your kool aid and play nice.

:spray:

Thanks, I needed a laugh.

They didn't even attack unexpectedly; he would have had plenty of time to draw and prepare to shoot as the attackers made their way into the train. You'll only get a gun taken from you if you're too nervous to shoot in the first place and don't have any training in weapon retention.

"Rambo's" around these days, as opposed to the "Peaceful protest PC pansies" that are constantly pissing and moaning around here lately. I hope you're never in a life threatening situation, faced with some attacker. But if you ever were, I really hope you'd fight, and stand up for yourself rather than cower and play "helpless victim".

:eyes:

> I hope you're never in a life threatening situation,
> faced with some attacker.

Too late; I've been.

But you need to recognize that many of the folks who
"fight, and stand up for {themselves}" end up quite
dead. Many of the dead even were heavily armed.

Tesha

And I don't even know you...

I've been saying this for years. I move from one town to the next as they get screwed over. I just discovered that Fortuna, California is going to get a Walmart. And I'm pissed! It was a beautiful little town. Now I don't want to even think about it. And that's not Sacramento by any means. Hell, even Sacramento was nice not long ago.

The most profound impact on my life was watching the fields in Silicon Valley disappear to concrete. My last week there was watching the neighbor's parents cry as one of the last remaining cherry orchards was bulldozed to make way for McMansions. Sick.

And this is the result. I'm not saying everyone gets violent. But...you know. I don't need to explain. The human being is an animal. Not a machine. We need trees, fields, rivers, deserts. Not Walmarts.

We will see more of this. It's time to think about how many people we want on this planet. It's time to stop growing. It's time to go back to community instead of inhumane international corporate living.

Edit- I suppose I have to add that I'm not condoning the behavior of these creeps.

Fortuna. The corporations are killing us and the entire planet. Their greed has to be stopped.

We need a leader like FDR who said to the Robber Barons: 'I welcome your hatred.'

Not sure why that is in this thread but Walmart most certainly wants to put it there because they can't put it here in Eureka and if the people of Fortuna understood the ramifications they would fight it as we did. Perhaps a showing "The High Cost Of Low Price" by Robert Greenwald down there would be a good start.

...had the conductor not stopped and instead ran over the metal on the tracks, derailing the train. Charge them with enough counts of attempted murder to cover each person riding the train.

My dad was an engineer for Conrail. WTF.

and crew are federal offenses, somebody's in trouble......

I don't know whether this would qualify for that charge, but it might since it was gross interference with the railroad system.

unless "that word doesn't mean what you think it does", as is so often the case in law...

Brings me to an interesting set of questions, actually: how is it that the English you learn in school isn't the English we use in our laws? Why do we allow words to mean different things in the legal sense vs. how we know and understand those words to be used?

Further, why is it permissable to use Latin in any law or legal decision or brief, when we, the People, are required to follow all law? We're being required to, in a sense, abide by law or precedent that the vast majority of citizens (Latin now being regularly taught nearly nowhere in our public school system) is unable to read.

And why don't we encourage legal literacy? Because it's too hard to understand?

And why is that? Why, I said why, above. It just goes round and round, with each element that makes it difficult to impossible for the public to understand the laws under which they live simply locking the other elements of the situation in tighter and tighter.

Do you understand what I'm saying here? How do we fix this problem, other than sending everyone in the US to law school (suuurrrrrre)?

was used in a case which established a "precedent".

That's why you don't just use any word, you use a word that has a legal precedent attached to it.

Our legal systems relies on "precedent".

Maybe they were after someone that takes that train e.g. a vendetta? Maybe they were expecting a different train, that had a valuable cargo?

rather than all the talk about more police on trains, we just put cameras? Put them everywhere. We could even put them in cable boxes and capture video of the people plotting to do these things.

Perhaps we could monitor their thoughts somehow?

Is somebody looking into this? :sarcasm:

i'm glad the engineer is still alive...

:wow: :wtf:

that the engineer or anyone else should never get out of the train until the police show up. It's not like a train has never been held up before.

A while ago our train hit a couch that was placed on the tracks. The power went down and we came to a stop. They have to check that it is save to continue and nothing was jammed underneath the train.

it is the conductors job to trouble shoot the problem, he is in charge of the train, the engineer is in charge of the locomotives..

When their shift ends.

Oneupmanship in the "happy slapping" game. We'll know if/when the footage ends up on Youtube.

for his head injuries and is also suffering from internal injuries. This wasn't "slapping" it was beating the bloody pulp out of him.

If this is what they did than I sure hope they have a video of it. They already arrested one boy and have identified another.

Then it has officially become both ;)

an emergency, like someone on the tracks or something. He wouldn't have necessarily had a weapon drawn in that situation even if he had one with him. We are finally becoming the post apocalyptic society I've always seen in the movies. It's not even safe to be good samaritan these days, someone will jump your ass when you least expect it. I guess in the interest of self preservation, I might start thinking about obtaining a CCW permit. It certainly seems that society is making the slow spin downward, like a turd in the toilet. One thing I refuse to be is a victim, and I never want to fear helping people in need.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/19/BAG52PBAAT1.DTL

WEST SACRAMENTO

Teen arrested in attack on train engineer
Youths allegedly beat him with rocks

Michael Cabanatuan, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Amtrak police have arrested a 17-year-old boy on suspicion of
assaulting a Capitol Corridor engineer who was dragged from
his train and attacked with rocks and bottles.

Vernae Graham, an Amtrak spokeswoman, said the boy, whose
name was not released because of his age, was caught shortly
after the attack and arrested Tuesday. Another juvenile who
was also held for questioning was released, she said.

The engineer was attacked after a group of youths stood on
the tracks and halted the train Monday around 10:15 p.m. The
engineer opened a door when a conductor was threatened by the
group, authorities said.

Amtrak police are continuing to investigate the attack and
are searching for four to six more suspects. The motive for
the assault remains under investigation, Graham said.

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Send them all to prison for a long time.